Young men are turning to fascism. I don’t use that word lightly. Hypochondriac leftists apply it to everything they dislike, from farmers’ markets to air travel. Still, when I see the combination of antisemitism, white nationalism, hostility to markets, and apologias for actual, literal Nazism (notably through the elevation of Adolf Hitler’s legal apologist, Carl Schmitt), I don’t know what other word to use.
How to measure the generational shift? Much has been made of Ron Dreher’s claim that 30% to 40% of Republican staffers under 30 are followers of Nick Fuentes, or “Groypers.” In fact, Dreher was quoting a friend’s guesstimate, and the actual number is probably lower. Even so, the direction of travel is alarming.
For anyone unfamiliar with Fuentes, he is a 27-year-old provocateur who enjoys horrifying his audience. As a teenager, he marched at the 2017 Unite the Right rally, reveling in the idea that a “tidal wave of white identity is coming.” He says he loves Hitler, and summarized his worldview as “Jews are running society. Women need to shut the f*** up. Blacks need to be imprisoned.” His X account, reinstated in 2024, has 1.2 million followers, and his America First livestream show attracts around a million views per episode.
What do his followers, overwhelmingly young men, find attractive? Fuentes is clownish and whiny, and has called himself “a proud incel.” Still, he is entertaining. A study by the Manhattan Institute in December 2025 found that Groypers were not poor or marginalized. What drew them to Fuentes — and Candace Owens, and other incendiary influencers — was entertainment: “Psychologically, this group was marked by desensitization, shaped less by fear than by boredom. Politics is entertainment: a stage for mockery, transgression, and performance, not moral seriousness or policy discipline.”
If it were only a bit of fun, there might be little to worry about. Young people often like to shock. Plenty of teenage Trotskyists grow into centrist boomers. The phenomenon is familiar to the Right, too. Richard Hanania wrote a moving column the other day about how, in his late teens, he “became one of a countless number of young men who found solace in Nietzsche’s thought”. Happily, he outgrew his Übermensch phase to become a brilliant writer.
The difference this time is that an entire infrastructure has grown up around the younger version of Hanania, and it shows no sign of reaching its extent. The tendency once known as “alt-right” now generally calls itself post-liberal, and is buttressed by a growing mass of conferences, think tanks, and magazines. Some of its thinkers are respectable intellectuals. Adrian Vermeule, who has done more than anyone to rehabilitate Schmitt’s skepticism about the rule of law, is a professor at Harvard Law School. Patrick Deneen, whose works are the closest thing to an illiberal manifesto, is a professor at Notre Dame.
Just as Friedrich Nietzsche would have been horrified by Hitler, both men doubtless find the Groypers distasteful. Yet they share a deep opposition to the values on which the United States was founded, preferring a quasi-theocracy.
This hostility is now overt on the post-liberal Right. Here, to pluck an example at random, is an editorial in the current issue of the paleo-conservative magazine Chronicles, taking issue with those who complain that the Heritage Foundation is no longer focused on America’s, you know, heritage: “The Declaration [of Independence] is an ordinance of secession from the British Empire, and the Constitution is an old list of laws and political compromises. This is akin to running into a fire to grab a drawer full of old legal documents.”
Skepticism about the Constitution is the original sin. Abandon the vision of the Founders and all manner of unpleasant things follow: strongman government, protectionism, tribalism, and, yes, the oldest hatred. Look at the various European autocrats, of Left and Right, who railed down the ages against “Anglo-Saxon liberalism” and “debased American capitalism”. Almost to a man, they were antisemites. It comes as a package.
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To put it another way, asking why young men are drawn to identity-based authoritarianism is like asking why folks from Indiana have two legs. We are a tribal species. Everyone is drawn to collectivist ideas until they are taught something better.
The U.S. used to be very good at teaching people something better, making individualists out of immigrants from some pretty tribal societies. Then, at some point in the early 21st century, culminating in the Black Lives Matter madness of 2020, we started telling Americans that they were defined by their race. Some of us warned at the time that there would be a horrendous backlash, and, sure enough, it is on us now. Ah, well. Two hundred and fifty years was a pretty good run.
